M
inistry cranks the evil knob up to 11 and manages to make an even scarier record than Land. Mind tightens the industrial attack by replacing music with machine noises, heightening the insanity with sampled voices, and bridging the intensity of punk and speed metal for a nihilism-to-the-nth-power revelation. Rape was a brutal album, lurid and hellish, but unintelligible lyrics allowed you to dismiss the talk of stigmata and deities as halloweenish if you wanted. Mind doesn’t let you off the meat hook so easily; it binds you, tapes your eyeballs open and makes you watch the horror. The stripped-down attack of drums, saw guitar, machines, beats and disembodied voices points back to punk rock and PiL, points forward to NIN, Rage, Manson and just about everything else industrial. At the time, Anthrax and Nitzer Ebb were making music similar to this but less intense, like an R-rated slasher movie compared to snuff porn. Lyrics about a succubus (“Dream Song”), thrill kills (“So What”) and surviving in a hellish reality (“Breathe,” “Cannibal Song”) were way, way beyond the pale in 1989. In taking on what they perceived to be the two biggest evils in society, government and religion, Ministry’s weapon of choice is clearly shock. But that shock had value for a generation who wanted to articulate their anger above the cacophany of media bombardment: MTV videos, political soundbites and CNN. Ministry had a Mind to elevate the anger, and in doing so they set the stage for the industrial, death metal and even the rap-metal movements to come. More than a landmark record, Mind is a headstone record that marks the death and corruption of rock and roll into something foul, frightening and fascinating.